Love everybody... (and everything)

Reciprocity or Death
Leonardo Boff
Theologian
Earthcharter Commission

When human beings decided to live together, they established an unwritten social contract, setting up norms, prohibitions and common purposes that allowed them to coexist with a modicum of peace. Later on, thinkers appeared, like Locke, Kant and Rousseau, giving the contract a formal status.

Those historic contracts have a common defect: they imply naked and acosmic individuals, who lack even a minimal link with nature or the Earth. The social contracts ignore and totally suppress the natural contract.

Even worse: beginning with Descartes and Bacon, the founding fathers of modernity, the illusion was sown that human beings are above and outside of nature, and that their goal is to dominate and own her.

This project has continued throughout the war of conquest, that continues appropriating all the natural resources and services, always resulting in the devastation of nature and a brutal dehumanization.

Previously, wars were waged to conquer regions and peoples. All Earth's territory has been conquered, and what is going on now is a total war, one without mercy, against the Earth, her goods and services, exploiting them to the point of exhaustion. The Earth can no longer rest: she has no refuge nor space into which to withdraw.

This aggression is worldwide, and the reaction of the Earth - Gaia - is also worldwide. Her reply is a collection of various crises, together forming a devastating planetary warming. It is Gaia's revenge.

There is no way out but to consciously and quickly reintroduce that which we had forgotten: a natural contract articulated with the social contract. We must overcome our arrogant anthropocentrism and put everything in its place, and ourselves as well, as a part of a whole.

What is a natural contract? It is the acknowledgement on the part of the human being that he is integrated into nature, from which he receives all, and the recognition that he must behave as a child of Mother Earth, giving her caring and protection in return, so that she may continue doing what she has always done: give us life and the means to live.

The natural contract, as all contracts, presupposes reciprocity. Nature gives us everything we need, and we, for our part, must respect her and recognize her right to exist and to preserve her integrity and vitality.

To the exclusively social contract we must now add the natural contract, one of reciprocity and symbiosis. We must renounce our drive to dominate and to posses, and enter into a brotherhood with all things. We cannot just use them, but when we do use them, because we need them, we must contemplate them, admire their beauty and their existence as an organism, and we must care for them.

Nature is our generous hostess, and we are her grateful guests. We cannot just seek to establish a truce in this endless war. Rather, we must establish a perennial peace with nature and with the Earth.

At no time did the 1929 economic crisis consider nature or the Earth. Its illusory presupposition was that they would always be there, at their disposal and with infinite resources. Now the situation is different. We can no longer take for granted the Earth, with her goods and services. These have been shown to be finite, and we have already surpassed by 40% their capacity for recuperation.

When will this factor be brought into the debate, into the search for solutions to the present crises? We are dominated by economists -- the great majority of whom are true Fachidioten, (“specialized idiots”), who see only numbers, markets and coins, and forget that they eat, drink, breathe and walk on contaminated soil. In other words: they can only do what they do because they are seated in nature, which allows them to do what they do, primarily, justifying egotism and the barbarities wrought by the present economy, that damages millions and millions of persons and that keeps damaging the base that sustains it.

Either we reestablish the reciprocity between nature and human beings, and rearticulate the social contract with the natural contract, or we must accept the risk of being expelled and eliminated by Gaia. I trust that we will learn from our suffering and that we will use the good sense that we will still have.

Leonardo Boff

06-26-2009


Free translation from the Spanish by
contacto@servicioskoinonia.org,
sent by Melina Alfaro, done at
REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas